Teaser 1
From The Pirate's Bride:
Until Julian Pratt — sometimes known as the Pirate, more often as Jule, like the girl’s name — made me his wife, I must have flown beneath their radar. It didn’t seem so to me: they were my neighbors, the customers in my father’s inn and pub, my childhood friends and later, the parents of the children I taught to love music. We brought food to one another’s doors with every celebration and tragedy, gathered on the town common Mayday and July Fourth, and worshipped together every Sunday, even in the depths of winter. Especially then. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Chapel Bay turned on the seasons, and we who rode out the bitter chill of the North Country to reap summer’s rewards understood survival meant dependence on one another. Born and bred among them, I thought that I belonged there. Until Jule came along.
If he were here, he would tell me to stop, to go back and begin at the beginning. He liked a story that ran in one straight line. “Harper, get to the point,” he often admonished, but Jule never understood that for me every point is like an iceberg’s tip on the water, that equally important details hide below the surface. “Women think in circles,” he would say in frustration. I never disagreed, but I never accepted it as criticism, either. Circles encompass, circles enclose. A straight line can only pierce.
I can almost hear him now. “For chrissake, what the hell does that mean?” If it were early in our life together, I might try to explain. Or if it were late, I would sweep from the room full of wounded dignity. And pride. Either way, he wouldn’t hear me… but perhaps that was my fault as much as his.
Passing through time, maybe we each end in singing a song of regret. Alone here, I don’t know; I have no one with whom to compare notes. Jule has been gone for almost forty years — a lifetime — and I have only the echoes of his logic and the wavering illusion of his forgiveness. But I like to think if he were here, perhaps we might find a way to reach one another, a way to hear each other again. And if I could change the words of my song, I would let my refrain tell him over and over again how sorry I am, and how much I love him still.
Prologue
If we each get a few lines in the endless song of civilization, you would know mine by the repetition of these words: she must have bewitched him. They said it first in a whisper, almost a joke, in the weeks after we announced our engagement. In my happiness, I couldn’t hear them; in those days, only Julian’s voice reached me. How that changed, why it changed, I still don’t understand. I only know that gradually their whispers grew louder, his words fainter, until what “they” said became the central theme of my life. She must have bewitched him.
Until Julian Pratt — sometimes known as the Pirate, more often as Jule, like the girl’s name — made me his wife, I must have flown beneath their radar. It didn’t seem so to me: they were my neighbors, the customers in my father’s inn and pub, my childhood friends and later, the parents of the children I taught to love music. We brought food to one another’s doors with every celebration and tragedy, gathered on the town common Mayday and July Fourth, and worshipped together every Sunday, even in the depths of winter. Especially then. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Chapel Bay turned on the seasons, and we who rode out the bitter chill of the North Country to reap summer’s rewards understood survival meant dependence on one another. Born and bred among them, I thought that I belonged there. Until Jule came along.
If he were here, he would tell me to stop, to go back and begin at the beginning. He liked a story that ran in one straight line. “Harper, get to the point,” he often admonished, but Jule never understood that for me every point is like an iceberg’s tip on the water, that equally important details hide below the surface. “Women think in circles,” he would say in frustration. I never disagreed, but I never accepted it as criticism, either. Circles encompass, circles enclose. A straight line can only pierce.
I can almost hear him now. “For chrissake, what the hell does that mean?” If it were early in our life together, I might try to explain. Or if it were late, I would sweep from the room full of wounded dignity. And pride. Either way, he wouldn’t hear me… but perhaps that was my fault as much as his.
Passing through time, maybe we each end in singing a song of regret. Alone here, I don’t know; I have no one with whom to compare notes. Jule has been gone for almost forty years — a lifetime — and I have only the echoes of his logic and the wavering illusion of his forgiveness. But I like to think if he were here, perhaps we might find a way to reach one another, a way to hear each other again. And if I could change the words of my song, I would let my refrain tell him over and over again how sorry I am, and how much I love him still.
posted by Delhui at 10:01 PM
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